We still keep improving the ecosystem readiness and tooling with each new major Drupal core version. Drupal 11 is to be released in a few weeks on the week of July 29 (so probably the first days of August) and already almost half of the top 200 modules are ready. But we need to keep thinking ahead.
The Project Update Bot (originally built by Ted Bowman at Acquia and since then very actively owned and improved by Björn Brala at SWIS) posted into more than 7600 project issue queues on Drupal.org with merge request suggestions to improve and in many cases solve compatibility with the upcoming major version.
I presented my first ever Drupal 11 deep dive session at DrupalCon Portland 2024 last week. It turned out to not just be about Drupal 11 but also about Starshot and even about Drupal 12 thanks to the coolest future-proofing technology I announced in this talk. Unfortunately not all of the attendees fit in, that wanted to attend, as the room was standing space only and many turned around and left. But here we go!
I strongly believe in open content. I came to open source from open content 24 or so years ago. So in good tradition, I built this slide deck on slides.com in way that is easy to share and fork. You can create your own or present directly from my deck with my speaker notes. The content is licensed with a Creative Commons license. I'll keep updating this slideshow, but under different URLs, so people can catch the latest edition of this presentation at Drupal Devdays Burgas next month for example. See some of you there!
If you can't make it there or plan to present this at your organization or meetup in the meantime, check out the open source slides.
The recording from DrupalCon Portland is below. Unfortunately I was not well prepared with a subtitling set up. I am exploring good tools and will do better next time! The conference tech crew tried to help in the middle of the session, but unfortunately they could not make it work either. At least managed to discuss some current Starshot questions while that was attempted. I promised a video with subtitles, which turns out Youtube nicely delivered, so I will not create a separate recording now. Hope this helps!
Drupal project lead Dries Buytaert just unveiled the Drupal Starshot Initiative and I couldn't be more excited! Starshot is all about putting users first. Enhancing Drupal core with additional components tailored to everyday users of the interface. Technically, it builds on Drupal core's robust foundation, utilizing Automatic Updates/Package Manager for seamless installation and maintenance, Recipes for the base system and on-demand additions, and Project Browser to help with recipe and extension discovery.
As I was talking to people about Starshot at DrupalCon Portland I realized it is easy to overlook how fundamental the changes proposed are in terms of how Drupal will innovate and the benefits end users will enjoy. At the same time those that did not have time to watch the whole keynote had understandable misconceptions about its nature. Some were concerned the fundamental changes are happening in the architecture, or a fork / parallel project is being set up. That is not where/how Starshot revolutionizes Drupal though. To address those misconceptions, I already worked on answers to frequently asked questions and published on the Starshot page.
This blog post will focus on the benefits that I see. I had the chance to participate in two hours of Starshot BoFs and then an hour long Q&A session at DrupalCon Portland. I also covered more technical details of Starshot's architecture in my Drupal 11 talk (including the most popular question on what the Launch button might lead to). Finally I had countless conversations with people at the event. Maybe confirmation bias, but there were only a couple people I talked to that were entirely skeptical. On the other hand I got very different viewpoints on what will the benefits be depending on who I talked to.
I think all of those are great, so I compiled them. Let's see 15 different reasons why I am super excited about Starshot and how it is very different from previous initiatives.
Drupal's adoption of GitLab lead to five times faster test runtimes but for this post I will look at how it makes it much easier to update modules to a new major version. It is now possible to fully use the user interface of drupal.org and drupal.org's GitLab features to make modules compatible and even make new releases available. I'll use one of my modules as an example: Upgrade Rector. Let's walk through what I did.
Thanks to 13 wonderful contributors, Upgrade Status 4.2.0 is out today! The new version is beautiful in Gin (light and dark mode), but even looks better than before in core's Claro. It improves continuous integration compatibility and has more graceful parsing of Twig templates. It has an updated list of rectorable fixes and is more compatible with Nikic PHP Parser. Thanks (in alphabetical order) to andypost, bbrala, estherp, joseph.olstad, lhridley, loze, mglaman, moshe weitzman, mpaulo, Pasqualle, ressa, risforrocket and saschaeggi for their contribution! Read on to see all the new things!
DrupalCon Portland 2024 is coming up next month! The event provides good opportunities to get help with three major transitions of Drupal in 2024. Drupal 7's end of life is near, while Drupal 11 is released this year. Finally, DrupalCI testing is superceeded by much improved GitLab CI pipelines shortly after DrupalCon. Here are some highlights of related events to not miss at DrupalCon!
I have the pleasure to organize the DrupalCon initiative keynotes now twice a year. The genius idea of this I believe came from Angie Byron, and ever since we include them, they are among the top rated sessions at each DrupalCon. The goals of this keynote are manyfold. First, we want to show the people who lead important work in core, humanising the software. While we do explain the state of each topic, the main thing we are looking for is to inspire and involve attendees at the event, which is possible by making connections between the presenters and attendees on the contribution day following the keynote. It is the humans that make it possible to create these amazing innovations in Drupal! DrupalCon Portland 2024 is coming up and this keynote is on again!
After 16 years, I was back in Brussels for another FOSDEM last weekend. Back then, as the lead maintainer, I presented about the brand new Drupal 6 version. Now I revisited the pieces that made the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative super successful (dedicated post about that coming soon). That reminded me how much I used this website and other custom websites to support initiatives I worked on, and how I neglected to take care of the site in recent years. I wanted to move a bit forward, and kind of got carried away in the best way possible.
Last week was DrupalCon Portland, our first in-person big DrupalCon back together with 1300+ attendees. I was fortunately one of the attendees along with leaders of in-the works Drupal admin theme Claro and frontend theme Olivero. Both Claro and Olivero have been in the works for years, and both were quite close to get done, yet we did not even dream of getting both be the new defaults in Drupal within the week. But we did it!
